In the course of a search of the IFI/Plenum Claims Reassignment and
Reexamination database I discovered an unusual description in the
"Action" field for a bunch of reassigned patents - "Letters
Testamentary", followed by some extended text. It turns out that the
PTO doesn't know how this description got sent to IFI - it's not what they
have on their internal reassignment records. It appears that the patents
are really reassigned to the assignee in the record, but the on the type of
reassignment are wrong. This text is in about 16,000, records in IFI's
database. I imagine the database will have to be reloaded with corrected
data after the mystery is solved.
While exploring my search output I noticed some differences among the
three loads of the database. In Dialog's file 123, the file banner shows
only the cutoff date for the data that's published in the Official Gazette.
Reassignment data is a couple of months behind, but the Dialog banner
doesn't tell you how up to date it is. The banner in STN's IFIRXA file
does tell you how up to date the reassignment data is, but the file was
updated at least twice since that date was entered. And the STN update
code reflects the date the file was update, not the publication date of the
OG data. The banner for ORBIT file CRXX also has the date the file
was updated instead of the publication date of the data, but it has an
updated reassignment cutoff date.
The ORBIT file has some more serious problems - the "Contact" and
"Assignor" fields aren't present in the database! Most of the time we
wouldn't really want to contact the assignee's representative, so we may
not care about the "Contact" field. The "Assignor" field is another
matter. IFI doesn't record the names of inventors of unassigned patents
or non-corporate assignees in the "Patentee" field, and because some
assignments are unrecorded, some patents are reassigned by companies
that are not named in the "Patentee" field. Without "Assignor"
information, the ORBIT records for these patent's don't tell you who the
previous owner of the patent is. I missed 2 of 10 reassigned patents in
a search based on a company name.
Edlyn Simmons
edlynsimmons@mmd.com (this is a new email address - hmri.com works too)
Hoechst Marion Roussel, Inc.